


Eidolon

by paperiuni



Series: Trifles from Thedas [6]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Action, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Catharsis, Friendship/Love, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-12
Updated: 2015-09-12
Packaged: 2018-04-20 09:47:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4782872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"Would you forgive me?" Dorian says at last, thick and hoarse. "Would you forgive me for never leaving you?"</i>
</p><p>Dorian finds a truth in an unlikely place, and it threatens to undo him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eidolon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [neomeruru](https://archiveofourown.org/users/neomeruru/gifts).



> Written for [neomeruru](http://archiveofourown.org/users/neomeruru/)'s kiss prompt on tumblr. Thank you, this was a hard one to crack. ♥ Thereby, thanks also to Bri, Katie and Jasper for first readings and listening ears.
> 
> I'm putting the prompt after the story because it is spoilery.
> 
>  **Warnings** : Brief gore, loss, heartbreak, unreliable narration. Note that **no archive warnings apply**. I've put a more spoilery list of warnings **in the end note** if you're still concerned.

The great moon hangs white and gibbous above the expanse of the Hissing Wastes, casting the faint, elongated shadows of the party across the cliff face they're following. Sera has point, an arrow pinned in her grip next to her strung bow and her hood cast back so it won't muffle her hearing. The layer of sand blown across the rocky ground softens her footfalls into near silence.

The rest of them aren't particularly concerned with stealth. Dorian can hear Bull hum under his breath, a slow and patchy tune he seems to be trying to remember, and Cassandra and Lavellan are talking quietly. There's a rift by the grotto at the northern end of the cliff, but it'll only start spitting demons once they get close enough. They're on the move in the pre-dawn chill so that they can be back to camp before the punishing heat of noon.

It might be the last such outing. Of course it had to take them somewhere that'll have Dorian scraping bits of desert out of his belongings all the way back to civilisation.

"I can't escape this," Lavellan says, a degree louder. "There might not be much point in speculating, for me. Why don't you ask the others?"

Bull's humming tapers off into an inquiring grunt. Dorian turns his head towards Lavellan, but it's Cassandra who goes on. "I was making conversation. I do not expect we will solve this on a cliffside in the middle of nowhere."

"Easy, Seeker," Bull says. "Fire away. Haven't heard a 'shite!' from Sera yet, so we've got more walking to do."

"Keep mouthing off and I let you walk right into the frigging rift, you big windbag," Sera tells him cheerily from the front.

"If we could keep this on topic," Dorian interjects before an exchange of insults can waylay the object of Cassandra's curiosity. He could use the distraction: he's been infuriatingly preoccupied, not by the discomforts of the journey, but by the likely fact that there won't be another, not like this, not for this company. Leliana and Cullen are pouring every resource they can spare into scouting through the Arbor Wilds, trying to pinpoint Corypheus and his forces. In the meantime, Lavellan stood firm that she should stay in the field and seal as many of the scattered rifts as she could.

Dorian tries not to think of it as a few more weeks of grace.

"Very well." Cassandra adjusts her shield strap where it's making her gorget dig into her neck. "I was simply wondering about our future fates. Assuming, of course, that we do live through this, but I find I have faith."

"Aw," Bull says. "That's almost sweet."

"Do not read too much into it." Cassandra's words belie her amusement. "What would you say, Iron Bull? Where will you be in a year's time?"

As Bull trails off into some half-facetious yarn about rich employers, easy jobs, and terrible ale, Dorian finds his eyes sweeping to the side. Their shadows tower on the pale sandstone cliff, blue upon blue, miming the swish of Sera's movements, the line of Lavellan's staff, the crook of Bull's horns.

The Inquisition is the tie that binds them all together. If they fulfill its purpose, they will one day break company as well. Places beyond Skyhold have carved their marks in them: Kirkwall, Val Royeaux--and Tevinter, twisted and ancient, broken and beloved.

"You mean to carry on as you have?" Straightforward as she is, Cassandra is far from gullible, and it echoes in her tone.

"I'm a free man with a skill I can sell." Bull shrugs. "If it's not broken, don't fix it. Might go to the Free Marches for a while. Winters are less crap there than in Ferelden."

"On that, we can agree," Dorian mutters, mostly so the others won't remark on his silence. There is Tevinter. Then there is Bull, and those two are as oil and water in his thoughts.

He's heard the whispers for change that ring out through the Imperium, and hinted at Josephine how to best augment those furtive voices by whatever means she has, but it is so little. If he wrote to Mae, if he could secure a way to return...

There would be a price. One paid in trust and comfort, candid company, fantastic sex, and the warm flickering of a thing he hasn't dared to name but that pulls at him every time he looks at Bull these days. The same thing that makes his hands linger and his thoughts tarry in the morning, when the scant privacy of a tent must be exchanged for the day's ride or walk.

"Dorian?" Lavellan says, lightly. "No opinion whatsoever? I might be shocked."

He's utterly lost the conversation. The ground slants down more sharply now. The dimming moonlight slides across geometric shapes in the rock face, the eroded remains of ancient statuary. Dorian ducks her gaze and tries to mask it as searching for a foothold.

"Shite!" Sera crows from some way ahead, sending Bull into a rumbling guffaw and providing a well-timed diversion. The quiescent rift roils into life at the bottom of the gorge.

"Dorian, Sera, high ground!" Lavellan calls out of old reflex, but Dorian's already moving. The edges of her green-glowing barrier catch him, wrapping around him fine and strong as spidersilk, which frees him to brace for the first demons dragged through the tear.

The rift sits under the cliff face, right at the mouth of the grotto itself. Sera darts to position herself above a cluster of rocks that'll hamper attempts to climb up to her. Cassandra dropping to guard Bull's left, they advance to the level ground below the slope as a united front--not a moment too soon. The rift convulses, an arc of bright energy nearly throwing Lavellan off her feet as it crashes into the ground, and the spindly limbs of a terror demon melt out of the glowering green.

Bull cleaves the terror in half, and its bone-scraping shriek drowns out even the roar of the rift as it bursts into tatters. As the wispy shapes of wraiths, lonesome husks enthralled by the rift, begin spinning into existence, Dorian dispels them out of hand to clear a path for Cassandra. Her sword flashing with purifying light, she rushes the second terror demon as it lands into the sand. Lavellan scrambles up to join the fray, her spectral blade lofted, while Sera pitches swift, deadly arrows into each gap that opens in the melee.

Dorian's grateful to fall into the well-honed rhythm. He'll never relish the killing of people, that he learned early and harshly, but demons will scarcely trouble his conscience. Fear and slumber enchantments will slide off the them, their minds repelling such mortal frailties; instead, his magic rakes across their corporeal forms, splintering limbs and rotting hide, so blades and arrows can finish the work.

When the first despair demon, lord of the terrors making up its vanguard, arrives like the first blast of a blizzard, Dorian cedes the spell offence to Lavellan and moves to shoring up the others' barriers. An ice spike through a vital organ will make for a quick downturn, and so far they've managed with superficial injuries. He's no healer, but a wound averted trumps a wound patched.

He dashes sweat from his eyes and peers through the burn and crackle of the open rift. Cassandra is right next to it, haloed with holy purpose, bashing back a looming terror with her shield. Lavellan hovers at her back: a thump of her staff to the ground slams down a glyph under the despair demon. The sigil goes off in a swirl of tarry, red-hot flames that snatch at the demon. Snarling a challenge or curse, Bull pivots to grab the opening. Dorian prepares to bolster his defence.

The rock at his feet erupts with the scrabbling limbs of a terror demon. It propels itself into the air, and in a rudimentary deflection, Dorian casts the barrier at his own feet before the barbed bulk of the demon hurtles down upon him. The shielding magic shimmers into blue ribbons as the terror rips into it, but it absorbs the impact so that he keeps his feet.

"Dorian!" Bull's call, echoing from beneath him on the slope, rings with concern. Dorian has a face full of demon, so the next word out of his mouth is an incantation.

" _Recēde_!" The barrier buys him the instant he needs: the spell is a crude, fierce application of force. He thrusts out his hand, and the pulse flings the demon backwards and--with any luck--onto Bull's waiting axe.

Dorian has a fraction of a heartbeat to realise his error. The centre of the pulse is in his palm. As the terror is repelled, the dregs of the same force hammer him into the ground.

First white, then black bursts in his vision. His teeth clack painfully. He hears the demon strike the sand with a keening like nails on glass, just as Bull's pounding steps close in in the same direction. Dorian drags air into his lungs and cinches his eyes against a lurch of nausea.

_Fasta vass. What an imbecilic mistake. Get up._

His fumbling fingers grasp the smooth wood of his staff. He heaves another breath, stifles the pangs of agony in his temples, and then the welcome boom of the rift folding in on itself swallows all other sound for a moment.

The sky above curves towards a pallid shade of blue, intimating dawn. He stands, propping himself up with the staff, and trails a look down the slope towards the remains of the fight.

He never gets that far. The sand's drifted and scored where the terror must've tumbled, and mixed into it are disintegrating parts, Fade stuff breaking up now the demon no longer gives it form and function.

Demon detritus. Then the blood, spreading slowly through the sand.

Bull's head is tilted awkwardly, one horn dug into the ground, the other pointing up at a shallow angle. His greataxe lies discarded next to his nerveless fingers, as if he'd gripped it until his grip no longer obeyed him. His one eye is glassy and unseeing, gone dim in a face framed by the blood pooling from his torn-out throat.

Dorian knows he's making a sound. That doesn't seem to connect to the wrenching sob that rises to his ears. The noise judders and echoes as if plunging through a cavern instead of the open air, and he's not sure how he's walking, his legs fighting to buckle on each step, but he moves until he can teeter onto his knees next to the body.

The body. Bull. Bull, who was laughing at Sera's cheek and taking the piss out of Cassandra moments ago. Not three hours have passed since he took Dorian's groans of drowsy complaint, kissed his mussed hair and mumbled _After we get back_ , before sloughing out of the tent with criminal cheer for such a small hour.

The razor claws of the demon have gone through the vitaar smeared down Bull's neck, raking through the windpipe. Smothering another wretched sound, Dorian pulls off his linen headwrap, to wear against the sun, and tucks it across the gashes. Blood blossoms stickily through the fabric.

His throat is dry, empty of words, as he runs his fingers down Bull's brow and closes his eye. Maker, for whose benefit do the living shroud the dead? Their own, so they will not have to look? His fingertips trace a trembling path over the eyepatch and the scars vanishing under it, down to the gentle, scarred mouth.

Not the faintest mist of breath meets his fingers. Bull always refused heavy armour, anything that'd compromise the reach and freedom of his swings; Dorian shook his head and took double care with his barriers.

Except today.

Nothing seems to move in the world beyond his own ragged breaths. He wants to drop down here and never stand again, to melt into Bull's fading warmth and the sand and rock beneath them. The deathroot will creep over them, and the distant rains will wash them away.

"Would you forgive me?" Dorian says at last, thick and hoarse. He bows his temple to rest against Bull's unmoving one. "Would you forgive me for never leaving you?"

A leaching sense of cold clenches around him, some essence of the desert night. He swallows. Takes another dust-laced breath. Time flows.

Through the slow slide of the grief, dragging him ever further down, come soft, cautious footfalls. He raises his head, frowning in fogged surprise. Oh. The fight is over. The rift is shut. There seems to be a pane of smoky glass between him and those simple facts, which blunts and distorts all but the anguish.

"Dorian." Lavellan, her silverite-studded glove on his shoulder. "Dorian, I'm..."

He dredges up enough strength to sit back on his heels. Battle fatigue is seeping into his veins, but he hardly notices, all else shunted aside from the way of the choking truth.

Lavellan loves Bull. Knows, better than most, better than Dorian himself sometimes, what Bull means to him. His thoughts tug at his choice of tense and he grits his teeth, feels his eyes well and blinks against the tears.

 _Loved_ , he corrects himself. _Meant_.

She's sorry. He knows. He allows himself to turn his head against her wrist, as if that thread of connection could suffice to bear him when another, one spun of hope and ease, wonder and confusion, has been cut.

"We can't leave him," he murmurs. Sera and Cassandra must be somewhere nearby. He can't hear other voices, only the waking wind among the cliffs.

"Of course not." Her hold tightens, just for a press of her hand. "I know you loved him."

"Don't." He drags the heel of his palm under his eyes. It's not the loss that guts him--he's left many things, people and places, without great hope of return--but the _end_. The severance of tomorrow from today, the end of the hope that with time, he could have the courage and the clarity to voice what she's just put into words.

"I also failed him." Morbid, useless self-flagellation. Her hand drifts up into his sweaty, sticky hair and he doesn't have the wherewithal to refuse the soothing.

"My dear friend." Her voice has gone soft, sonorant. "It hurts. I know, I know."

"I suppose--" Dorian lets his nails dig into the flesh of his palm until his hand shivers with the strain of clenching his fist. Whatever audacity he wanted to put into the words scatters like loosened pebbles. "I suppose I have my answer to Cassandra, now."

He dreaded the choice, and now all chance of choosing is gone from him.

She only makes a humming in reply, like reaching for the first notes of a melody, and the sound is wound into her words. "It need not be so, Dorian. If you only trust me. Do you trust me?"

The question ricochets in his head like an arrow bounced from a shield. What manner of time does she think this is to--Of course he does--

"I can undo this," she says, honey and summer heat in the sound that's no mortal voice anymore, "I can bring back your darling Bull, and you will never lose him again."

No mage has that power. Dorian can trickle life into the fallen, enough to make them into tools and weapons, but it's a sham, a pale imitation. He knows that as he knows his own hands, and the knowledge is what pierces his daze of sorrow and futility.

This is a dream. The thing wearing Lavellan's form is not the Inquisitor. Its hand is tender upon the curve of his skull.

It might deserve credit for stealing the guise of his esteemed friend. A rather original touch, all told, but--

Numb sorrow hasn't even fully given way to dry, wary acuity when a third sentiment floods through him. The Fade is folded shut around him, and he doesn't know where reality seamed over into the dream. The terror demon threw him scrambling, the spell backlash disoriented him, and then came the sight of Bull.

Which of this is true? Is there blood in the sand under his greaves, or only illusion oozed through grains of memory upon this islet of the Fade?

"Take your hand off me." The command falters.

"Oh. My presumption, entirely." The fingers slide delicately from his hair. She--it, it, _it is a demon_ \--sounds faintly dismayed, as if he'd spilt the cream across the tablecloth at tea. "He did adore you, did he not?"

He's still on his knees like a supplicant, and though the feel of the sickeningly familiar hand upon him is gone, the weight in the creature's words remains. Disgust and horror and resolve in a tangle in the pit of his stomach, Dorian seeks the staff he dropped in the sand for the second time in moments. If it's been moments. It might've been hours. _Break the dream. Find the weld, and you're free._

Unless this is what awaits him back in the desert: Bull, dead at his feet.

"You can't turn back time," he whispers.

"But I can do so much more," says the voice, which is bleeding towards a deeper timbre, husky and sweet as fresh-cut grain. "You fear the pain, but you don't have to ever face it. Stay, and you will be cherished. Stay, and you will be loved."

There's the staff, or a dream-mockery of it, whitewood and silverite, thankfully solid. Dorian runs his thumb across a shallow groove, sanded and polished but permanent, from when he caught a Freeman's sword meant for Bull's back. Death comes, and sometimes you can put yourself in its way. Over and over, until the day your strength or wits or magic aren't enough.

"And how," he says, barely a rasp, "would you propose to give me that?"

"Time can't be turned." Footfalls, now, circling up from behind him. "But many hurts can be healed. Like he did yours. They burned so bright, and were so easily smothered."

Maker's grace, Bull made it so _untroubled_ , and Dorian has a practiced eye for comforting lies. _Do not trust_ , Tevinter susurred in his memory, _do not surrender, do not be gentle. Never hope for more._ One by one he let those lessons unravel.

"I can--" A long-fingered hand passes across his bowed field of vision, bare of the protective glove. The dark skin seems to swirl and ripple, and the nails shimmer like tiny jewelled blades. "I can mend this, if you only wish."

The hand settles on Bull's brow, and it twists Dorian's heart that he doesn't strike it away the instant it lands there.

 _Beloved._ It sat often upon his knotted tongue, not only at the height of pleasure or upon the jagged edge of relief. In far more innocuous moments, with the road curving away ahead of them, in long mornings in Skyhold, in weary evenings at camp.

He could stay, and he would be loved.

Under her hand, the dark patches in the linen he draped over the wound begin to shrink. All this while he hasn't looked at her face, and he still doesn't, only watches with helpless enthrallment as the blood vanishes from the fabric and leaves it unmarred.

If he goes now, his loss will be irrevocable. His mind's swift to supply recollections of field burials; pyres of wood, peat or brush, so the fallen can be sent on, with verses from the Chant of Light spoken over the flames.

Once Bull taught him a litany of Qunlat, the most spare of funeral rites for a people with no regard for the stopped husks of those they loved. A lie, that, of course. _Maraas shokra._ He can hear the way Bull's voice went down, his own attempt to repeat the stresses and then hide the fact that he'd mangled them.

His cheeks are wet. He's almost stopped noticing. He tries to reach back through the last hammering events of the fight and comes up short, belayed, unsure.

"I will give him to you, as your heart desires," she says. "You will never be apart."

Dorian sets a shaking hand over Bull's chest to feel how cool the skin has turned. He tries not to think of the stages that follow, of pooling fluids and stiffening muscles, though they flare up from boyhood lessons quite without his summoning them.

What would it matter to let himself be taken, if he could undo this?

She's soft and subtle, content to woo and whisper. He could yield a corner of his mind, a stepping stone into the world. Unlike a demon of rage or hunger, she'd grasp the demand for caution, the need to get past the watchful eyes of his friends--

"You poor, sweet thing." Her hand drifts down to hover atop his own, not touching, fingers curled with potential. "Only call him, as you call him in all your dark longings. No one need know. You will be safe, and you will be loved."

Dorian bites down on his tongue until there's blood in his mouth, bitter and coppery.

There it is. The marrow of his weakness. She's silent but he can feel the thrum of her rapt expectation--spirit or mortal, neither of them can be other than what they are in the end.

_Would you forgive me?_

"I'm sorry," he says, clearer than he thought possible, and touches Bull's face as if he could soak it into his memory in that fleeting brush of fingers. "I will not fail you again."

Then he gets the toes of his boots firmly into the sand, one knee providing a third point of support, and swings the staff in a ferocious arc. The angle is bad but the surge of lightning he pours into the runes compensates for it. The rivets snag against the demon's face and send it staggering back.

It rears with a cry of affront. The face that may have borne his friend's likeness is warped with an unearthly sneer.

Dorian stands, the shining coils of a dispelling glyph at his fingertips.

"It has a fetching sound to it, no? Unconditional adoration, on one small condition." He inhales. There's a shiver in his breath that strives to pulse through his entire body, but he steadies himself. "But I loved him, and I will not be unworthy of that."

The purifying spell is only a finishing touch, a wash of white against the crouching form of the demon. In the Fade, purpose is force, intent is strength. The thing that shatters the dream isn't his magic but his acceptance.

If he has a pyre to light tonight, he'll light it as himself.

Everything whorls into green, then into black.

Pain--clean, physical feeling--slams into his back in a hundred dull beats, and by sheer luck his head strikes a deeper patch of sand. The impact still lances darkness through his field of vision.

Dorian rolls over onto his stomach, trembling palms flat to the ground, and pushes himself up onto his arms. Behind his eyelids the light is low, not yet sunrise. Sound rushes back into his senses in a cacophony of demon shrieks and clashing metal. He groans to process the storm of sensory information, his mind torn from the Fade and back into his bruised body. His breath comes in quick gasps he cannot calm.

The others. Bull. They need him. He can't lie here while the fight's still going. Where the fuck is his staff?

"Now, _now_!" shouts Cassandra, just as Dorian spots his missing weapon jutting from the ground on his left. Groping for the haft, he feels the ground reverberate with the long, dragged-out roar of noise as the rift is sealed. The green tinge in the air fades into the blue of morning.

This would be where he could let go. Yield up the state of high alertness and allow himself to slump, secure in the end of the fight.

He pushes his tongue against his palate. No blood, though his jaw hurts where his teeth clicked hard together. His heart thuds into the curve of his ribs. Sera's running feet sound from his right, drawing up towards him. He must open his eyes.

He accepted the consequences. There's no struggle now, only the denouement--and there he staggers, unable to take the blithe thought to its conclusion.

Twisting to get his feet under him, crouched down, he makes himself look.

The slope at his feet is strewn with dissipating demon remains; the chitinous green limbs are turning into dross and dream in the cold of the world. Past the cloven terror corpse, on his knees in the sand, Bull is scraping grit and ichor from his armour.

Lifting a hand to his mouth, Dorian drops down hard to sit in the middle of the rise. He doesn't turn when Sera dashes past him, her sure step proof of her being unharmed. 

His throat is too thick for words. Further off, Lavellan is talking, low and breathless, and he forces down a pang of sickness. That is her, he tells himself. She is real. As is Bull.

Dorian blinks tears from his lashes, wipes at them with the back of his grimy glove. Oh, he hates to cry. The wall of his usual resistance has been replaced by something hollow and vulnerable.

Bull takes that moment to look up. He's done the same sweep Dorian is conducting piecemeal, the instinctive check at the end of combat that everyone's moving and breathing. This is a slower look, lingering on details, and his brows knit as soon as he turns towards Dorian.

For once, Dorian isn't half aware of what his expression spells out. He aches with relief, over the drag of the strain to wrench himself free from the dream. 

_I thought you were dead. I lost you and I almost lost myself._

That's the price of knowing your dreams. The Chantry preaches the price of madness, the dangers of hubris, and what do they know? He dreamed Bull's death and now he must live with the awareness of what he nearly did in response.

Worry is trickling onto Bull's face. That galvanises Dorian into movement at last.

Bull lets Dorian come to him, sets down his axe and pulls off his gauntlets, leaving only the leather bracers girding his forearms. "You all right?"

 _Yes. No. I don't know._ He tries for a weary laugh and it comes out more like a sob. "I've been better."

As far as Bull knows, he was momentarily stunned. Time folds in the Fade under rules that defy a mortal mind, even one that can walk lucid along its twilit ways. Dorian reaches out until his fingertips rest on the side of Bull's throat. The skin's coated in fine dust, striped with sweat, whole and untarnished. He slides his thumb down the slant of a tendon. He should let Bull stand; the ground can't be good for his knee.

"Come on, fire-spitter," Bull says--never a demand, always a permission. "Screwing up a spell isn't that big a deal. We're all good."

Dorian could hardly describe the strangled sound he makes: elation and fear and terrible affection. "I don't give a dried fig about the spell," he breathes, and then, even more hushed, "Oh, love."

He buries his face in Bull's shoulder as he mostly collapses into the embrace, arms around Bull's neck, fingers pressing into his upper back. Bull catches him without complaint, one wide palm settling against the nape of his neck. As Dorian shakes his head in reflexive protest, it falls to rest between his shoulder blades.

It may take time before he can stand to have his head touched again, even by Bull's warm, trusted hand. Right now, for a long moment, he only clings.

"Dorian." Bull's supporting a good portion of his weight, the embrace an untidy, tangled thing. Bent bodies and gripping limbs, Dorian's damp breaths on Bull's shoulder. "Dorian." Not _talk to me_ or _what is it_ , and somehow Dorian finds the grace to be thankful for Bull's steadiness. This is not his fault.

He braces his hands on Bull's shoulders and stands back. He can hear the others, some way distant. As if following his cue, Bull gets to his feet, too. The sand is turning from the pale grey of night to the dull pink shades of dawn.

"I'm sorry." He's too raw and spent to bite it back. "I need... I need a moment. Some time."

"Nothing to be sorry for." Bull's fingers skim his hair and then, with a twitch of memory to steer them, settle around his upper arm. "Something happened."

Dorian raises his hands to cover Bull's cheeks, and Bull bows to meet him, responding without quite understanding. It makes Dorian's heart ache and still all at once. "Something happened. It's over now." _I love you, and that saved me._

Bull nods against Dorian's brow. His mouth tastes of sand and salt.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Warnings, Additional** : This fic contains a non-permanent character death, in a sequence in which a character is under mental manipulation.
> 
> *
> 
> The prompt was " 'returned from the dead' kiss".


End file.
